All Posts By

Andrea Koeppe

Harvard Business Review removes full access to selected articles

It has become a depressingly common question this semester at the reference desk. I am asked why a permanent link to an article is coming up with an error message, or a user sees this message on an article she wants for a class.

I look at the citation and sure enough the answer is staring at me right in the face. The Harvard Business Review is a long standing, respected publication, that covers a wide range of business topics and articles are assigned readings in many undergraduate and graduate classes. Business Source Premier is the only database at UST that provides the electronic access to the Harvard Business Review starting from 1922 up until the present issue. I remember very clearly in the early 2000’s when the UST libraries decided to to make the switch from our then full text business article database, ABI INFORM to Business Source Premier from the vendor Ebsco. The librarians debated the merits of both products, we conducted surveys, and finally one of the main reasons we switched was because of the full text access to HBR that we knew our users wanted.

Fast forward to August 1st 2013 when the publishers of HBR started to block full access to their most popular articles like the one you see above. Professors can no longer link to these articles from their Blackboard page, and while users can view the articles when they find them in Business Source Premier, they can no longer print or save the articles in front of them. There is no established list of these 500 articles, users will have to just cross their fingers when they click on an article from HBR that the article they want is not on that mysterious list.

This issue with Harvard goes beyond UST, and it is not going unnoticed. The Chronicle of Education published a very comprehensive article describing the circumstances and potential impact of this situation, while business and reference library associations issued their own response to Harvard’s policy. Recently I shared an article with an OCB faculty member who was not able to link to an HBR article and she replied ‘I would not want to be on the wrong side of librarians.’ I was very flattered by her response and gratified that she perceived librarians as facilitating access to information. So when this access is denied for whatever reason, then yes, you do not want to be on that wrong side.

November 12, 2013 by Andrea Koeppe

News & Events

UST libraries celebrate International Open Access Week

Oct. 21 through 27 is Open Access Week at the University of St. Thomas.

OA Week is an effort to promote open access publishing as a new norm in scholarship and research. The UST Libraries will take advantage of this week to provide information to the community on the concept of OA publishing and related issues on the UST libraries Open Access information guide.

What is Open Access?

OA publishing allows unrestricted access to scholarly, peer-reviewed research on the Web. ‘Unrestricted’ here means, free of charge, without a password, without a subscription, without anything that prevents a user from getting to the content.

Why should you care?

Research is remarkably discoverable through library databases and discovery systems, Google and Google Scholar, and open repositories. But most often immediate access to the content is limited by whether the searcher or the searcher’s library has a subscription to the journal in which it was published. (In 2008, only about 20 percent of peer-reviewed content was available in open-access journals.) Therefore, others who would like access to your paper are turned away. This shrinks your potential readership and diminishes the impact of your article and your research.

In addition, if you retain the rights to your content, you can do more with your content (beyond just loading it to our local repository, UST Research Online). You can hand out copies to your students, you can post to your own website, and you can reuse charts and graphs in other papers and presentations.

Different levels of Open Access:

If you decide to publish in the OA environment, you must consider various levels of “openness.” At one level, Green Open Access, the publisher allows the author to post a peer-review post-print to a local repository, or into a central repository such as PubMed Central. This is not a new phenomenon, and many disciplines have been doing this for 20 years: High-energy physicists, for example, have been publishing their research in arXiv.

At the highest level, in Gold Open Access, the publisher provides immediate access to all of its articles on the publisher’s website. Public Library of Science is an example of this level of access.

There are hybrid alternatives between Green and Gold, including charging the author or the author’s institution to provide access to articles. To discover the openness of a journal to which you are considering submitting your important paper, check SHERPA/RoMEO to view the self-archiving and copyright policies of many publishers.

Recently, Britain’s Wellcome Trust and the U.S. National Institutes of Health have created policies around Open Access and their funding. Essentially, they require that the recipients of their grants be able to post their articles in an open access environment within six to 12 months of publication. Many prestigious universities, such as Harvard, Princeton and Duke, require their publishing scholars to choose publishers that embrace open access policies.

This is the time for you to choose, with intention, author-friendly journals that make your content open and available with few, if any, restrictions on access and permit you to retain your rights. This is the time because of the high level of discoverability of content regardless of where it is published.

Benefits of open access publishing

OA increases the availability of scholarship to the widest possible audience and encourages the proliferation of new research and new ideas among the academic community.

OA makes it possible for libraries and universities to provide content at a reasonable cost, thus lowering budgets and, by extension, tuitions and need for public support.

October 20, 2013 by Andrea Koeppe

News & Events

Celebrate Banned Books Week at the UST Libraries

What does the children’s book series ‘Captain Underpants’ have in common with ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’? They both top the 2012 list of most frequently challenged books according to the American Library Association’s State of America’s Library Report 2013. In order to highlight instances of challenges made to books on local levels, the UST Libraries will join thousands of libraries and bookstores across the nation to celebrate the 31st. anniversary of Banned Books Week Sept. 22nd. – Sept. 28th. Since its inception in 1982, Banned Books Week has promoted the idea that while not every book is intended for every reader, each person has the right to decide what to read, listen to or view. By focusing on efforts across the country to remove or restrict access to books, Banned Books Week draws national attention to the harms of censorship.

Throughout the week the university’s libraries will observe Banned Books Week with displays and events in the O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library, a “Banned Books Coffee House” discussion lounge, library tours, updates on the UST Libraries Facebook page and an informative UST Banned Books Week website that will link to other libraries, articles and videos that focus on issues of intellectual freedom.

Also returning is the popular Banned Books Week trivia contest (posted on the UST Banned Books website). Test your knowledge each day of the week with a new question about a famous or infamous work of literature. Each day’s winner will be selected randomly from among those with the correct answers and will receive a $5 gift certificate to the UST Bookstore or a popular banned book.

banned_2013

September 17, 2013 by Andrea Koeppe

News & Events

Libraries host video & discussion about copyright & mashups

As part of National Library Week the UST Libraries are proud to host a presentation of ‘Copyright mashed-up and remixed’, an open source 17-minute documentary by filmmaker Brett Gaylor based on the documentary ‘RIP! A Remix Manifesto.’

‘Copyright mashed up and remixed’ explores the tensions between preserving ideas and creative works in the public domain to be used freely by anyone; with the need to fairly compensate authors for the work that they create. The video draws upon cultural history, the current legal environment, and the role of emerging technologies that are bringing these debates to the forefront of public attention.

Afterwards there will be an informal, and hopefully very lively discussion about the issues that were presented in the video. The discussion will be led by two UST professors: Mark Anfinson, a practicing attorney and adjunct professor in the COJO department who teaches Media Law and Steve Cole, recording artist and head of the Music Business program at UST.

This event will take place on Thursday, April 18th in the O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library, Rm 102 from Noon – 1:00.

Bring your lunch if you wish – beverages and a light dessert will be provided.

April 8, 2013 by Andrea Koeppe

News & Events, Uncategorized

Nancy Sims open access presentation at UST is online!

Nancy Sims, the copyright program librarian at the Univesity of Minnesota, and advocate for democratic information access, spoke at UST last month about open access publishing, a new model for scholarly communication. The event was sponsored by the UST libraries and it was well attended by faculty and librarians from UST and neighboring institutions. If you missed her presentation it has been made freely available to watch here.

January 8, 2013 by Andrea Koeppe

News & Events

Nancy Sims to speak about open access publishing model

The University of St. Thomas libraries are pleased to host an event with Nancy Sims, who will speak about the issues and challenges of the open access publishing movement, which has the potential of increasing the visibility, access to and sharing of faculty scholarly research.

Nancy is the Copyright Program Librarian at the University of Minnesota libraries with a JD from the University of Michigan Law School, and an MLIS from Rutgers University. She says that her job is not to be the “copyright police” on her campus, but to help individuals and groups throughout the University community to understand issues surrounding copyright and scholarly communication. Nancy says that she is fascinated by copyright law in all of its aspects, and in particular, how individuals construct understandings of copyright as it relates to their own scholarly, artistic, professional, personal, cultural, and communicative activities.

She has published articles and presented at conferences about copyright issues, technology, and emerging forms of scholarship.

Nancy Sims’ presentation and question and answer period will be in McNeely Hall 100 from 3:00 – 4:30 on Thursday, December 13th. This event is free and open to the public and refreshments will be served.

November 29, 2012 by Andrea Koeppe

Database Highlights & Trials

TRIAL – New international newspaper database

How often have you read a story about an important news event taking place in another part of the world and wanted to know more about it? Or what about wanting to know how world events are perceived in other parts of the world as opposed to the North American perspective? The Access World News Research Collection from Newsbank provides full text access to over 6,000 international news sources including newspapers, newswires and magazines.

You may enter keywords or phrases just as you would any other article database –

The real power of this database is the ability to take the topic you want to learn about and then pick the news sources you want to use. You can start out broad and look for newspaper sources from all over the world, you may choose to search specific regions such as all of Asia, or you may decide to drill down to specific countries. You may choose the countries you would like to search with menus or you can click on colorful maps that put the countries you are interested in into context with the rest of the region.

Finally, if you decided that you wanted to get a very local perspective instead of a larger, global view of an event, you can use The Access World News Research Collection to search North American and state sources. Just as you can click on individual countries to find their newspapers, so you can click on states for regional stories and opinions. This way you can read views on the Arab Spring from as far away as Kazakhstan, or as close to home as Delano, MN.

In full disclosure, the University of St. Thomas does already have two databases that contain the same level of international and local news coverage, however after trialing this database I have to say that this beats them both in terms of ease of use. If you have used either Factiva or Lexis-Nexis before I believe you will find The Access World News Research Collection a breathe of fresh air. And if you have not searched either of those news databases then I think you are in for a treat.

Either way I would love to hear your opinion! This trial will continue for three months so you have plenty of time to explore and compare it to what we currently own. Regardless if you agree with me or not, I would love to hear your opinion! Please send any and all comments or questions you have to me.

October 2, 2012 by Andrea Koeppe

News & Events

Celebrate Banned Books Week at the UST libraries

Banned Books Week 2012 marks the 30th anniversary of the national book community’s annual celebration of the freedom to read. The event is sponsored by the American Booksellers Association, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, and the American Library Association. According to the American Library Association, there were 326 challenges reported to the Office of Intellectual Freedom in 2011. The 10 most challenged titles of 2011 were:

1. ttyl, ttfn, i8r, g8r (series), by Lauren Myracle
2. The Color of Earth (series), by Kim Dong Hwa
3. The Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collings
4. My Mom’s Having A Baby! A Kid’s Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy, by Dori Hellestad Butler
5. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
6. Alice (series), by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
7. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
8. What My Mother Doesn’t Know, by Sonya Sones
9. Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily Von Ziegesar
10. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

Throughout the week the St. Thomas’ libraries will observe Banned Books Week with displays in the O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library and the Charles J. Keffer Library on the Minneapols campus, free bookmarks and an informative Banned Books website that includes a survey to vote for readers’ favorite banned or challenged book and a daily online banned book trivia contest.

September 30, 2012 by Andrea Koeppe

Business & Economics, Database Highlights & Trials

TRIAL – Three Additional Collections in Emerald Management 175

The UST libraries have subscribed to Emerald Management 175 for over five years because of the access it provides to scholarly full text management and international management journal articles. Now for a limited time UST is putting on trial other collections in Emerald previously unavailable in our current subscription.

To search the additional collections, go to the main Emerald search page and conduct a keyword search. From the results you may choose to look at all of the results or limit the hits within an individual collections.

emerald2

Emerald’s Business, Management and Economics eBook Series Collection
This collection contains over 400 volumes across multiple business and economic topics such as Management Science, Business Strategy and Organization Studies with new titles added regularly. The interface allows users to search through entire books or books on the chapter level. Many books and chapters are written from authors world-wide to ensure a global perspective.

Emerald Social Sciences eBook Series Collection
The Emerald Social Sciences eBook Series Collection extends the current Emerald business portfolio with high-profile international authorship and high quality cross-disciplinary research with over 240 volumes from over 35 book series titles in the fields of politics, psychology, sociology, health care and education.

Emerging Markets Case Studies Collection
Emerald Emerging Markets Case Studies is a new online collection of peer-reviewed case studies focusing on business decision making and management development throughout key global emerging markets written by case writers working in developing economies that offer local perspectives.

The trials end 11/5/11. Please get any comments or questions to Andrea Koeppe at arhudson@stthomas.edu.

October 6, 2011 by Andrea Koeppe

Business & Economics

Now I know why those birds are always so angry

Not only do they have to deal with smug and noisy pigs all day, but now they are being blamed for costing businesses over a billion dollars in lost wages because so many people fling them about while at work. I was immune to this craze for a very long time and therefore had a fleeting sense of superiority until I finally tried my hand at the game and because as addicted as everyone else. However I know that I can curtail my new habit at least while I am at work. And so now if you will excuse me I have a Facebook status to update.

September 15, 2011 by Andrea Koeppe

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